Domain Maximus

(Originally written a week ago. So parts of the post may suddenly leap out at you with uncanny chronological frivolousness. Deftly side-step with a “Bah!! Die you content belittling demon of chornological accuracy!!!” and the post should read fine…)

Monday morning and the commotion outside the window reveals no respite from the showers. The TV dissapoints and the day starts off on a wrong note with the paper guy dropping off the wrong paper. A quick group SMS confirms we need to work out of home today and that means another day of iffy dial-up connections and boring hours spent over powerpoint presentations but without the comforting presence of broadband, raaga.com and the coffee machine. We still have not got a gas connection even after a month of applying. But why bore you with the sob stories of life in our corner of Wadala. Rather let us go back to my reminiscences of my life gastronomique.

My first job was one not amenable to too many culinary escapades. Long hours in the plant and a house in a corner of an industrial estate meant most meals were called in from Dominoes or Pizza Corner. Most of the time I was delivered depressing pizza and soft drink that had spent eons in the battered delivery scooter. By the time it reached my doorstep both pizza and coke had achieved an even equal lukewarm temperature. The meal was a constant struggle with pizza crust that can only be described as vulcanized. Finally after a few weeks my teeth could take it no more and I frequently made the bus trip to Ganga Sweets at Anna Nagar West. They made the most irremarkable “chat items” as they call it down south and insanely sweet Ras Malai which had so much colouring in it that the only thing that lasted longer than the after taste was the stain on ones shirt if you dropped it. Everyone told me to try out the Saravana Bhavan across the road. But just one visit to that Chennai phenomenon and I pledged never to go there again. Apparently their waiters were trained in the Idi Amin school of cheerful customer service inclusive of the thumb-in-tea, dosa-end-on-table and other age-old customer delight classics. And of course the relaxed dining atmosphere where you could lounge in your chairs after dinner for upto 15 whole nanoseconds. In the AC upper class they allowed a luxurious full minute of relaxation before you were asked to leave. With a flick of brown-green dust cloth. Sheer luxury.

Chennai was also where I discovered the joys of the Punjabi Dhaba Concept restaurant. There was one at Anna Nagar circle and a very popular one at Cenotaph road. More than anything else I remember the Amritsari Kulchas and the Lassis. But sometimes they took the decor to ridiculous lenghts. Even the most moist and tender morsels of Tandoori Chicken are difficult to savour when the ropes of mock charpoy bite into your moist and tender backside. But the lassis were amazing. The steel glasses were 3 feet tall and you wonder how all of it fit into one person. Especially the exquisite beauties who frequented these joints. The ambience was excellent. But my butt still hurt.

In my second year in Chennai I developed this thing for mocktails and sandwiches. So much so I signed up for something called a Masti Card you got from Musicworld I think just so I could get the 15% discount at a nice little eatery opposite the New Woodlands Hotel. Many many are the evenings I have spent there over baked beans and mushroom sandwiches, milk shakes and ice creams. The last football world cup saw me spend many evenings perched on orange chairs looking up at the TV on the top right hand corner. One memorable evening I watched the match with a bunch of non-english speaking oriental looking types watching Japan Vs. Morocco I think. I was rooting for Japan and grabbed a chair right in the middle of this big bunch of oriental soccer fans. I learnt some memorable lessons that day. Including the fact that Morocco has some very oriental looking fans. By half time I had quickly scooted out with a baby corn and peas sandwich safely in a plastic bag.

Then happened the Cafe craze that to this day significantly hits my bottom line. In both ways. While the caffeine addiction hit an all-time high in Ahmedabad the flavorful foundations were set in place at the Cafe Coffee Day a few paces down from Anna Nagar Circle. (Yes I noticed I havent seen much of Chennai besides Anna Nagar have I?) It is some indication of my pulsating social life in Chennai that I used to spend over 8 hours at a stretch sitting in the cafe reading, thinking and trying to do crosswords. I used to know the guys who worked by their first names and some weekends they played some of my mp3 CDs. I was a lonely man with only a Tropical Iceberg and Penthouse Letters for company. Which meant my next career move was a no-brainer. Coffee + Porn = MBA.

Ahmedabad has to be world’s number one restaurant city. There are restaurants everywhere. I mean everywhere. It is the home of authentic vegetarian American, Mexican and Italian food. Amdavadis were never bored or lazy. No my dear reader if an Amdavadi had ten minutes to spare he opened a restaurant. If he was on transit from Chicago to Baroda and had a stopover in Amdavad for two hours, he rushed out of the terminal, opened a Thali joint made a couple of crores and checked in. That was how crazy eating out was in Ahmedabad. And only one thing was crazier than the number of restaurants. The number of people who wanted to eat in them. Weekend meant that hordes of families descended onto the eateries and cafes of the city and let loose orgies of, among other things, Pakwan Thalis, Paneer and Havmor Icecream. The good non-vegetarian places were few and far between and Saturday nights usually meant feasting on the biriyanis at Four Foods, the mandatory mallu eating place, or Tomoatoes, the mandatory over-priced American decor place.

Four Foods was where Amdavadi mallus celebrated any occassion with chicken, mutton and fish. Since good non-veg was tough to come by, these occassions were frequent and included such age-old auspicious events like the Sunday after Onam, all four days before Onam and all non-even days of the month. But honestly the food was not that great. But parochial spirit clouded our taste buds, and that and the Mohanlal songs on the stereo meant every morsel took me back home to Abu Dhabi… err… Thrissur.

“Tomatoes” is nothing short of a phenomenon in Ahmedabad and one of my fave ROML. The decor was severly Yankee-influenced and if it wasn’t for the prohibition rules it would easily make one of the pubs that are all the rage for a few years and then slide away into oblivion. But their menu was interesting and they made a decadent Tiramsu shake that went straight from glass to artery lining in two or four mouthfulls. The crowning glory of the “Tomatoes” menu was the non-veg tandoor platter. It is to be seen to be believed and I will refrain from describing it so as to not disturb my vegetarian mostly celibate friends. Of course my veggie friends dabbled in such things like Cheese Tacos and grilled paneer and things like that. But even they gasped when a tandoor platter made its appearance and secretly wished they were never born Iyer. With a sad shrug they then quickly munched down on a piece of lifeless unemotional unpoetic babycorn.

Ah the Cafes. Hours I tell you. Hours were spend sipping brew and munching on cling-wrapped sandwiches lounging around on the orange sofas. There was a big bunch of us and few were the days when we were not at a nearby Barista or Coffee Day outlet sharing jokes and some excellent coffees. Or maybe the company just made us think the coffee was good. Soon we knew very cool facts like that the Barista at Vijay Char Rasta never had ice, or that the Coffee Day at Passport office always had less food than the one at Orchid building. As you can see even in the midst of so many people we were all individually porn-reading coffee-drinking anti-socials. Sometime in second year though our simple coffee drinking adventures were complicated by the arrival of Cafe Mocha in Ahmedabad. Cafe Mocha is to Coffee Day what Pamela Anderson is to Mamta Kulkarni. Infinitely better quality but still big big portions. We lounged more, drank coffee more, and went back to buying less toothpaste and soap to afford it. But Ahmedabad will be Ahmedabad and soon there was a waiting list of around 4 million people on the weekends. I miss Cafe Mocha though. I miss the coffees, the deserts and the awesome floor couches. And of course the celebrities. Once we saw Parthiv Patel there. He walked in, was served a cup of coffee and then promptly dropped it on the floor. As always happens to poor Parthiv it had bounced off a rough patch and was entirely not his fault

Sob. The cafes of Ahmedabad evoke many a nostalgic memory. Thankfully we were all shipped off to our respective workplaces and with the emergence of the salary and credit cards I embarked on an ongoing journey of culinary discovery… But Mumbai and its restaurants deserve a whole blog to itself…

Till then… sleep, work and eat well while I whip up a little post on Bade Miya et al…

It is another day of foreboding in Mumbai. It has been raining all night and as I wake up I first think my plans for breakfast at Basilico now looks very unlikely with the incessant showers. But a quick flip through the channels and one phone call from a friend later the situation prroves to be very grave. Hardly has the city bounced back from two days of madness and it seems like the streets are flooding again and people are being asked to stay indoors again. The city continues to receive plaudits from everyone from the PM downwards for its resilience and grit. But plaudits do not pump out the water in the roads or light the bulbs in Kalyan or Kalina. Thousands have no food, water or light.If it rains again today and the floods rise again we just might see the fabled resilience of the Mumbaikar wear out. What then?

Outside my windows visibility is a grey haze through the thick showers and I can see the colony of taxi drivers across the vacant plot behind my building. The rows of black and yellow cabs parked outside the buildings I guess means they wont be hitting the roads atleast for the time being. The authorities make interesting statements with the Police asking people to stay indoors while the airports say they are functioning and people can come. Jet has cancelled all its flights. Here we go again…

But I guess life must go on and so should my blog. I have been fairly busy over the last many weeks. Engrossed in a project so far, it is only this weekend that I can spend some time sitting at home doing nothing without fearing what Monday holds for me. So I was lazily leafing through an assortment of old newspapers lying around at home. Newspapers are queer things. They can accumulate for weeks in a corner of the kitchen or by the floor next to the armchair. Unread and uncared for. But alas not having a paper delivered at home even a single day is an unmentionable sin akin to not keeping your remote controls in plastic covers or, as my manager pointed out, wearing white tennis socks to a business meeting. (Under my trousers I mean…)

So there I was languidly strolling through a fortnight old copy of the Hindustan Times when I was forced to stop and smell the flowers at a column by the delectable Vir Sanghvi. He was talking of some of his favorite restaurants in Mumbai in yet another edition of his eponymous column Rude Food. But a few column inches through I was losing interest at an exponential rate as it was but a rehash of some of his excellent but old columns published recently in a compilation.

So my mind wandered and I figured if so many people paid to read him write of his favorite eateries why should not I feast my readers to a brief guided through the (and I love this phrase) restaurants of my life… So draw up your chairs, smoothen the napkins down the fronts of your shirt fronts and make sure you have an open excel sheet handy for the boss when he comes around…

Ironically the first real restaurant of my life (ROML) was Abdul Aziz Restaurant on the ground floor of my apartment building on Old Airport Road. Ironic not because it was a non-descript little mallu run place with a short menu and a shorter client list, but because for all the years I lived above and walked past it, I never ever ate there more than once or so. I really need to jog my memory to evoke images of the place. Let me see it had old creaky 70s style tables and chairs all topped with wood-stain Formica sheets. And lots of Lipton tea promotional materials. The yellow and red emblem was everywhere. On the walls, under the glass table where Abdul Aziz uncle hardly sat all day, and on the wooden box which held wax paper towels near the single wash basin. That box was special as the opening in the top was cut in the shape of the Lipton emblem. At that time it was popular in down-market restaurants all over Abu Dhabi and I always managed to skin my fingers while pulling out sheets.

Abdul Aziz was a short rotund man who looked exactly like the image “short rotund’ invokes in ones mind. He was a sweet friendly man who always offered me tea or some apples when I came back from school which I always refused like my mom told me to. He used tinted glass cutlery which made all his curries look the same and were either bottle green or a caramel brown. And so all his gravies, be it chicken, egg or the consolation mixed vegetables, all looked brownish green or well very very brown depending on what bowls he used. They all had a thin layer of oil on top and even though we lived in the building for some 15 years we never ever ordered a single dish from downstairs. Not that Abdul Aziz minded or we were embarrassed because of it. It was just the way it was. He was a family friend though. Once he celebrated the birthday of his son who was miles away in his village in Kerala. But he asked my parents to let me stand in for a little mock birthday party on the upstairs family section of Abdul Aziz restaurant. I cut an overly sweet cake and got a gift I do not remember except that it was covered with plain silver wrapping paper. We shifted out of that house a few years ago and then the building was demolished to make way for a new residential building. The grocery and used car shops came back but Abdul Aziz did not.

The first ROML where I frequently ate with family was the Emirates Casino restaurant. But have no allusions of Monte Carlo or even Macau mind you. It was probably named after the Casino Hotels in Thrissur and served North Indian, South Indian, Chinese and Rest of the World in Mallu style. Which means they found fascinating ways to infuse coconut into every dish on the menu. (But that still pales in comparison to the Kerala stall at Dilli Haat which serves an authentic malayali Fruit Beer… shudder…)

A close second was the Arab Udipi where my dad insisted we order the Veg Thalis. As kids we hated the dented to death steel plates and bowls. Except for the payasam which was the one limited dish on the menu, we abhorred all the sabjis. The Puris were oily, fried and perfect. But lasting memory to this day are two wall hangings which adorned the walls in the dinghy family section upstairs. (All the gulf Indian restaurants had family sections upstairs with bad lighting, bad air conditioning and Hillary-esque steep stairs.) One was of a dancer in Mohini Attam costume who at that pre-adolescent age appeared quite comely to me, and another was a completely irremarkable one of an elephant. It was just on top of the landing of the stairs and so I guess I just saw it too many times.

At this point I think the ROML took a radical turn with the discovery of Kentucky Fried Chicken and the world of fast food outlets and irresistible promotions. KFC continues to have a lasting impact on the life of the Vadukuts. My dad continues to use a faux leather laundry bag which we got in some promotion at KFC over 12 years ago or so. Crimson red with the face of the KFC mascot emblazoned on both sides it has become an irrevocable part of the family. A case of the laundry bag being more valuable than the laundry. (If there is such a saying…)

KFC and other fast food restaurant visits were inevitably rewards for good performances in exams and class tests and other ventures academic. At that young age such incentives were taken seriously. Unfortunately I was a decent student and this coupled with the incentive program made sure I was always obese, socially neglected and reverted to fast food for comfort. A first class vicious circle. With fries and coke. Till a few years ago we still had boxes of fast food chain toys at home. I still miss my clown faced calculator and chicken alarm clock. The calculator sang “Happy Birthday To You” every time you opened it. For a couple of days it was ok. Then it became a frigging pain in the ass. Every time I cheated on my maths homework the banshee screaming would start nullifying the very purpose of the bloody thing. But soon my younger brother devised a way of opening it without the evil ballad. I did well in maths. And got more cool stuff. Like the laundry bag.

Then of course are the ROML that were not your typical eating joints. Like a horrid restaurant in Bombay Airport that served chicken sandwiches that looked deceptively like bread rolls with filling but were so cold and hard that each bite momentarily drowned out the noise of planes landing, taking off and skidding off runways. But the sandwiches at some place called Swastik somewhere below a railway bridge in Santa Cruz were heavenly. Moist, light and spiced with a proprietary Swastik masala it was a revelation when I had it for the first time in Bombay. Once in Ahmedabad I came across a sandwich very similar to that but it had beetroot and beetroot has no business being in a sandwich. (Or in this universe… blech…)

By then I had grown older and I knew the difference between chopsuey and fengshui and learnt that you could not pack leftovers at a buffet. Albeit painfully. Engineering in Trichy was a plethora of many ROMLs. There was Cascade the coffee shop that was open twenty four hours a day and served only idlis for 16 of them. And of course Suvai where a friend was served a piping hot portion of Gulab Jamuns during one visit. Only thing was he had ordered for a Club Sandwich. But with both items having an “L” and a “U” so close to each other who can blame the waiter… Suvai though had an excellent Tandoor Platter which accounted for a large part of my pocket money. But I managed, like all engineering students, by controlling expenses on such frivolous things like toothpaste, soap and underwear. However I believe of late Suvai no longers lets people from my college partake of their excellent weekend dinner buffets. Apparently the term “eat all you can” was not applicable for engineering students for whom “can” meant gastro-intestinal collapse or complete extinction of the species that was used to make crumb-fried fish. Whichever came first.

Then followed the days of salaries, credit-cards and the intriguing eating outlets of Chennai. But there is such a term as too large a helping on a plate. So tune in soon to read the second portion of the ongoing adventures of the author and the Restaurants of his life…